


who touches your mouth? (the social construction of the android body as a site of pleasure)

by garden_hoe21



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Academia, Actor Allusion, American History, BDSM, Discourse, F/F, Gen, Gender, It's more fun than it sounds and there will be porn later, M/M, Mentions of Eden Club (trafficking) and of Carl's death, Other, Political, Race, Sex Work, bodies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-17
Updated: 2018-08-17
Packaged: 2019-06-28 13:23:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15708099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/garden_hoe21/pseuds/garden_hoe21
Summary: Humans often seek pleasure through their mouths, from breastfeeding, on to food and humans' often difficult relationships with it. Alcohol. Cigarettes. Cannabis. Red ice. Kissing. Sex.





	who touches your mouth? (the social construction of the android body as a site of pleasure)

When Markus finally met with the dean of the philosophy department, the man had whipped his penis out and offered to trade Markus a “favour for a favour.” As a former healthcare worker, he was accustomed to penises, but the context was so egregiously inappropriate he couldn’t help but be shocked. Markus refused and, of course, filmed the entire interaction for blackmail. (By now, he films every one-on-one meeting. Who’s going to take his word over a human’s?) To make a long story short, androids have blanket permission to attend all classes in the philosophy department now.

Dean Dick-out introduced him to one of the department’s human instructors, a diminutive leather-clad post-doc named Switch. She teaches a class called Political Identity and Embodiment, and seemed annoyed that the idea of androids taking the class would even be a question. She describes her class as blurring the lines between political discourse, art, queer theory and disability studies. She doesn’t show him her genitals. Markus likes her.

He went on a late night show a few weeks later to talk about the ground-breaking initiative. Even production staff members were snapping and hooting at him. Apparently the humans find him “sexy.” They certainly like to let him know as often as possible, paying no regard to context or the propriety of the situation. He’s expected to take it as a compliment.

A magazine last week declared Markus to be the Sexiest Android Alive. He snorted at that, but supposed at least using the word “alive” was a tiny modicum of progress. A reporter came by Jericho and they had a fascinating discussion about the right to attend school being a turning-point for human/android relations. When the magazine came out, there was a spread of fashionable photos of Markus listing the price of each clothing item, encouraging humans to “shop his revolutionary look!” He hadn’t posed for any photos, yet there he was all smouldering eyes and expensive threads.

Markus knows that faces such as his design, which emulates a human of mixed-race ancestry are considered most attractive among Generation Z. Is that why Kamski designed him the way he did? So that Markus could be a beautiful object to gift Carl? He feels a pang, a dissonance between these facts and his affection for Carl that remains even after the man’s death.

Only a few centuries ago, humans who looked like him were expected to be grateful for “privileged” positions inside the homes of wealthy white humans. Men and women who looked, for example, like Josh, or Kara’s partner Luther, did not have such dubious privileges.

Political Identity and Embodiment. Markus turns the idea around in his mind. What is his identity? Up until recently, his people weren’t even recognized as sentient. Now that they are, is he a man? Is he a black man? If so, does he have responsibilities to black humans, or only to androids? Do his responsibilities to black-designed androids take precedence over his responsibilities to other androids? If he chose not to be black, or male, that could change in less than two hours, by his estimate. Does this fact take away his right to those identities? It could make his CPU burn out, thinking about this.

Here are the things Markus knows he is: Markus is a friend, a revolutionary, a leader, a teacher, an artist. An abolitionist. But all humans care about is the form of his buttocks, his dreamy odd-coloured eyes, and his mixed-race design. And they expect him to thank them for their fetishization of him as a “hunk.” Even when he’s filmed with his skin off, he receives letter after unsolicited letter about the things humans want to do to his “smooth porcelain body.”

He realizes he owes North an apology. It does not feel good to be treated like you are worth nothing but what your body can do for others, how looking at it or touching it makes them feel. He’s only felt a modicum of what she’s been through and when he pressured her to tell him about her past in non-consensual sex trafficking, he fully minimized the experiences that she went through, emphasizing his own experiences in a gilded cage with a “not all humans.” He shoots her a message that he would like to talk.

The day he announced the news at Jericho about the class a few other androids took him up on the opportunity: North, Lucy, Amy and Blaire (the couple formerly given the regrettably hypersexualized moniker of “the Tracis”), Kara, Simon, Josh, and a few of the Jerrys have all signed up for the class so far, along with several humans.

Markus is sure at least half of these signed up so they could either a) gawk at their android classmates, or b) feel like Woke Humans for working and studying alongside them. It comes with the new territory, he supposes, and it’s worth it for this experience. Android teachers are not a new thing, even at the undergraduate level, but android students? That was something worth fighting for. Knowledge, after all, is power, and participating in the academy will give androids an unprecedented opportunity for the legitimacy and prestige of being seen engaging in intellectual discourse in a human culturally approved way.

His turn to present to the class is coming up. Kara, a mother who recently returned from Canada, is a friend of North’s who she helped get into the pro-Domme business. She’s become fascinated with the Madonna/Whore complex, discussing it with Markus when her daughter Alice is safely out of earshot atop Luther’s shoulders. She says it took her quite a while to see herself as a sexually empowered being while still understanding she could be a good mom, and she wants to explore that academically. She’s even seeking permission to bring a submissive human client to class for a mild demonstration.

North, Amy, and Blaire, on the other hand, are working on a project exploring whether android sex work with human clients can ever truly be a choice, given that many androids were created expressly for the purposes of sex with humans. They’ve also written some good stuff on the subversive nature of android-to-android sex work.  Josh is doing a presentation on American human body modification over centuries, and Simon is studying bodyless artificial intelligence and the concept of identity without the body. 

Last week the Jerrys presented an amazing slideshow about the history of the American freak show and disability theory. They teamed up with some androids who were modified without their consent by a human. The group of them are designing a haunted house as part of their final assignment. (Apparently humans enjoy being scared and will pay androids handsomely for the privilege.)

Markus starts thinking about his own his political identity, as an android, an artist, an activist, and an apparently highly sexualized member of the public. He backtracks, thinks about the very concept of  _ bodies _ , and he can’t help but reminisce on his time spent as Carl's caretaker. So much of Markus’s entire experience of embodiment has been shaped in relation to other bodies. There cannot be a caretaker, after all, without one who is cared  _ for _ . It’s a symbiotic relationship of sorts.

He thinks about the feeling of medicating Carl, cooking for Carl, running his daily errands. And as he thinks, he settles on this idea about mouths, and lips. Closer to the end, Markus had to feed Carl; during active dying, he would clean, hydrate, and moisturize Carl's mouth. Power dynamics aside (as if that were possible), caring for Carl’s mouth was always an experience of deep intimacy. He starts comparing and contrasting the social constructions of the human mouth and the android mouth.

Humans often seek pleasure through their mouths, from breastfeeding, on to food and humans' often difficult relationships with it. Alcohol. Cigarettes. Cannabis. Red ice. Kissing. Sex.

Markus doesn’t eat or drink or smoke, but he has kissed once. During the android freedom march, he knew that a display of compulsory heterosexuality would be excellent optics for their cause. North had agreed, so they kissed, assuming the humans would make something of it based on its importance in their culture.

He was right. That display had saved his life. Mouths are deeply important to humans.

He thinks about North's mouth, and the mouths of Amy and Blaire, and their colleagues (fellow trafficked androids?) at the Eden Club. All were programmed to provide pleasure for humans, both vocal and tactile. Androids were not designed to experience pleasure in their bodies unrelated to human pleasure. Markus’s mouth, for example, was designed to give medical advice and instructions, kind, caring words, and even kisses to ailing humans.

He opens his word processor and takes down some notes: “The project of constructing the android mouth is about deconstructing both human and android mouths, undoing the human assumption that a mouth is a mouth. The android mouth must be disentangled from the human mouth that it was obviously based on by separating out all the things human and android mouths are capable of and the things they are required for. The android body doesn't “need” a mouth to intake fuel. It can be used to drink thirium but only if required by injury.”

Political Identity and Embodiment.

“The android does not need a mouth to speak or to communicate affect to other AIs but may choose to use a mouth for these functions and many others. To fight. To break things. To touch objects. To arouse and/or stimulate. Therefore, unlike the necessary purpose-limited human mouth, the android mouth becomes a locus of excess, choice, and possibility. What would it look like for androids to situate pleasure in the mouth?” he writes. “What would it mean to reconstruct the android mouth as a site of pleasure?" 

Who else’s mouth is political? The Jerrys, with their constant upbeat smiles that no loving-yet-exhausted human parent can match. Lucy, the social worker programmed to tell humans what they want to hear regardless of the truths she actually knows. And -  _ oh! _

Connor, obviously. How did he not process that earlier? Markus notes down his ideas as fast as they come.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Parts of this are based on a true story, but I won’t say which parts. I would absolutely sign up for this class, just to watch everyone’s presentations. 
> 
> People’s opinions on Markus’s body are taken pretty directly from the way his portrayer Jesse Williams’ body is constructed in the media.
> 
> The Jerrys’ presentation is based on the work of [Eli Clare](http://www.eliclare.com/wp-content/themes/wpremix/images/Freak%20Show%20syllabus.pdf).
> 
> Thanks to everyone from the [">Detroit: New ERA discord](https://discord.gg/GZFhw6E) for convincing me people would be interested in this! I encourage anyone who reads this to please take this concept and run with it!
> 
> And be sure to read the Detroit: New ERA series by Fantisimal, starting with [Sacrificial Lamb.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15204947)


End file.
